WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 7 March

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, the first Mac ransomware has been found in the wild, Amazon's Fire OS will be getting its on-device encryption features back, SpaceX successful launched but failed to land its latest Falcon 9 rocket and more.

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Security research firm Palo Alto Networks has reported the first known instance of ransomware that targets Mac OS X ever seen in the wild (Ars Technica). It appeared in a compromised version of the Transmission BitTorrent client, available from the official Transmission website for 36 to 48 hours. Transmission has announced that "everyone running 2.90 on OS X should immediately upgrade to 2.91 or delete their copy of 2.90, as they may have downloaded a malware-infected file." Dubbed KeRanger, the malware is reported to encrypt the contents of a user's hard disk and, after completing this, demand a payment of one bitcoin (£284) to unlock the data.

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Following recent controversy over the removal of encryption options from its Android-based Fire OS mobile operating system, Amazon has announced that the feature will be returning in a future update (TechCrunch). An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that "we will return the option for full disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring." The feature was originally removed late last year because, Amazon said, few users were taking advantage of it, but an ongoing legal battle between Apple and the FBI brought attention to the security of mobile operating systems.

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On Friday night, following four scrubbed launch attempts, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched the SES-9 communications and broadcast satellite into a high orbit (PopSci). However, as CEO Elon Musk had predicted, the rocket booster failed to make a successful landing on a barge at sea, due to the great height and speed of its descent and the limited fuel it had remaining. Musk tweeted about the landing: "Rocket landed hard on the droneship. Didn't expect this one to work (v hot reentry), but next flight has a good chance."

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ByNicole Kobie

Following BuzzFeed News's publication of leaked support tickets that appear to show 6,160 tickets with the keyword 'sexual assault' and 5,827 tickets with the keyword 'rape', Uber has said that it actually received five claims of rate and "fewer than" 170 claims of sexual assault. The leaked data covers a period between December 2012 and August 2015, and while Uber says that many of the keyword matches are false positives, caused by people complaining about unrelated issues or by people with the name 'Rape', the leaker also provided screenshots of subject headers clearly referring to sexual assault by drivers. BuzzFeed also reported that Uber appears to be attempting to identify the source of the leak, "contacting customer service representatives in its system who had searched the Zendesk database for the terms rape and sexual assault".

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Google has confirmed that now all searches made from within the European Union will comply with the EU's 'right to be forgotten', regardless of which international version of its search engine is used (The Verge). The 'right to be forgotten' is the enactment of a 2014 EU court ruling that says search engines must comply with requests to remove some search results about private individuals. Google said that "starting next week, in addition to our existing practice, we will also use geolocation signals (like IP addresses) to restrict access to the delisted URL on all Google Search domains, including google.com, when accessed from the country of the person requesting the removal."

Ray Tomlinson, who invented email and gave the @ symbol its ubiquitous place in our lives, died on Saturday morning, aged 74 (The Guardian). Tomlinson invented the email system in 1971 as a person-to-person messaging service for ARPANET, the US military network that was the predecessor of the modern internet, allowing people to communicate with users on other servers on the network. Thomlinson was working for research and development firm Bolt Beranek and Newman, now Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he still worked at the time of his death.

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A new paper documents the discovery of the world's oldest species of chameleon, which lived during the Cretaceous Period, 99 million years ago (CNET). Measuring just 18mm in length, the specimen was one of 12 lizards preserved in amber donated by a private collector to the American Museum of Natural History. The chameleon originated in the prehistoric jungles of what is now Myanmar, and micro-CT scans have revealed that the ancient lizard had the characteristic extending tongue of modern chameleons, but had yet to evolve the fused toes and typical body shape of its latter-day relatives.

The future of the Coleco Chameleon, a retro-inspired, cartridge-based console project that started life as the Retro VGS, has been cast in doubt after purported working prototypes have been identified as random bits of hardware shoved inside the Chameleon's Atari Jaguar-based shell (Motherboard). Brand licensor Coleco has said that if an independent engineer can't verify a working prototype, it will revoke the right to use its name for the console.

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How China's Singles Day exploded and totally dwarfs Black Friday

ByNicole Kobie

Cyan, the studio behind the genre-defining puzzle games Myst and Riven, has released the first trailer for its open-world puzzler, Obduction (Polygon). Modern technology means that the games are no longer limited by a flick-screen navigation interface, but instead exist in a full 3D world, although an old school alternative is available for the hopelessly nostalgic. Obduction is themed around collecting memories in the worlds of Hunrath, Mofang, and Villein, and raised over $1.3 million on Kickstarter.

The Internet Archive's online software preservation efforts have expanded to include games and utilities for the historic Apple II (VentureBeat). Pseudonymous curator 4am is focussing on tracking down and making playable the rarest titles released for the platform. The archive's Apple II Library currently includes 637 programs, from popular classics such as Maniac Mansion and Battlezone to rarely-seen educational titles like Monsters and Make Believe Plus.

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The Open University started as a radical idea, now it's in trouble

BySanjana Varghese

Industrial spies could accurately 'steal' 3D objects by recording the sound of them being produced on a 3D printer. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have demonstrated a method by which a 3D design could be reverse-engineered by analysing the vibrations picked up from a common 3D printer. Mohammad Al Faruque, director of UCI’s Advanced Integrated Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, showed in his research that a basic recording made with a smartphone could capture enough information to recreate a given object.

WIRED goes inside China to find out when we can all learn from its most inventive startups. We profile Xiaomi, the $45bn startup that's leading a new kind go innovation and visit bizarre component markets of Shenzhen. Out now in print, iPad and iPhone. Subscribe now and save.

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